Constant Reader

Here, you’ll find a profile of Stacey Levine, The
Stranger‘s 2009 Genius for Literature; look there if you want to
read about an intelligent author. This column is not about a genius of
literature, although you could probably make a halfway-decent argument
that he’s some kind of an idiot savant. Stephen King’s new
novel, Under the Dome, was released on November 10, and the
book—all 1,067 pages of it—is being marketed as a return to
form for King, whose last two novels were at best parodies of his
earlier, creepier work.

There’s a reason that Dome calls back to vintage King; he
began this novel twice, once over 30 years ago and then again in the
’80s, before declaring it to be too much for him to handle and putting
it away. Dome‘s plot—a mysterious, impenetrable
dome surrounds a small town in Maine, and the townspeople quickly
devolve into a howling mob without society to hold them in
check—provides King many opportunities to revisit some of his
earliest themes.

There is an undeniable pleasure to reading King’s work, in the same
way there’s an undeniable pleasure to watching a Steven Spielberg
movie: The pacing is always full-speed-ahead, the thrills can often
creepy-crawl into some basic part of your brain, and the storytelling
is simple enough that you’d have to be dead not to get drawn in.
But he also has the same problems as Spielberg: His emotional scenes
are way too sentimental and treacly, the simple storytelling can often
be too simple, and the endings almost always dissolve into
overexplanatory drivel.

There are 600 great pages here. Unfortunately, they’re intermingled
with passages that not-so-cleverly evoke a host of threadbare
21st-century liberal fictional clichés—waterboarding,
global warming, leaders swept up in senseless, megalomaniacal
Christianity—that were already heavy-handed when they appeared on
network television in 2004. And several truly weird plot
choices—an opening passage from the point of view of a
woodchuck (“His last thought before the darkness that comes to us
all, chucks and humans alike: What happened?“), the fact that
King sticks his protagonist in a prison with nothing to do for the
middle third of the book, and a later conversation between a ghost and
a corgi that ultimately comes to nothing—solely serve to bloat
the book to classic King proportions.

Still, despite causing some apoplectic eye rolling, the book chugs
along just fine until the final 35 pages, and then the real
horror begins. King concludes Dome with the most ridiculous,
inane climax that he has ever trotted out—even more lame than the
literal hand of God in The Stand. In just 3 percent of the book,
King manages to make Dome into a very long joke with a fart for
a punch line. It’s beyond scary; it’s just plain stupid.